The Earl of Edgecombe has a new mixtape out. This one is all about New Orleans. Here’s the full tracklist:

1. Intro
2. The Death of Bounce - The Showboys vs. Wynton Marsalis
3. Blackbird Xtra Special - The Dirty Dozen Brass Band
4. Chocko Mo Marrero Clap - Danny Barker feat. MC Thick / Skip / Juvenile
5. Buck Jump Booker Time - Gregory D & DJ Mannie Fresh feat. James Booker
6. Sexual Healing (Hot Like an Oven Mix) - The Hot 8 Brass Band
7. Slow Motion Walk With Thee - Juvenile feat. Soulja Slim / Ray Nagin

You can also download this from here, where you will also find a nice flyer. The Earl loves feedback, so leave your comments below!

This just arrived in my inbox this morning, so I thought I’d share. I’m thinking that the tsunami of hope is not quite high enough yet that we will be hearing an official presidential campaign song from a Bmore rapper. But how about using it in some targeted ads? Just the fact that you might stop and consider the idea says something about the current climate, doncha think?

When Barack Obama is president, all radio stations, even NPR, will be required to play a certain minimum number of hours per week of hip-hop.

Mullyman has a Myspace here. Mully’s song The Life, The Hood, The Streetz is on both versions of The Wire soundtrack, which you can find here and here. The image of Barack Obama above comes from a limited edition print by Shepard Fairey, which is here. Barack Obama himself is here.

I’m Blake Leyh and I endorse Barack Obama for president.

If you’re not a hip-hop fan from Baltimore, you may not know this track. But in Baltimore, The Hamsterdam Mixtape which this comes from was one of the biggest hits of 2005 and is still going strong. It’s sold well over 30,000 copies last time I checked, and that’s without any official label release. The Hamsterdam Mixtape is named after the al-fresco legalized drug market from Season 3 of The Wire, and features a huge lineup of Baltimore MCs: Diablo, Mullyman, Tyree Colion, Shellbe Raw, Bossman, and more.

Juan Donovan and Jamal Roberts, the two producers who comprise Darkroom Productions, are the minds behind The Hamsterdam Mixtape, and they are at this moment hard at work on Hamsterdam 2: The Re-up, which should be hitting the street at the end of November. Darkroom contributed several tracks to Season 4 of The Wire, and you can hear this track in the episode which airs tonight, October 29th.

There’s a great City Paper article about Darkroom Productions here, and you can find their official site here. Essential reading for Baltimore Hip-Hop coverage is the blog Government Names, which is here. There was a New York Times article recently about Baltimore Hip-Hop and The Wire, which you can read here.

Always at least a day late, but almost never even close to a dollar short, The Earl of Edgecombe has finally dropped his Summer Mix 2006, just in time for your Labor Day pig roast. It includes the following artists, tripping gracefully around, over, and under each other simultaneously:

Augustus Pablo / Dem Franchize Boyz / Thelonius Monk / Jay-Z / Max Romeo & The Upsetters / Lee Perry / Indeep / Young Leek / Eric B & Rakim / Marrs / Talking Heads / Manu Dibango / Leslie Winer / Future Sound of London / John Cage

Previous posts with The Earl, all of which still contain active links:

Jamie Foxx V. Eno & Byrne: My Unpredictable Life
Summer Mix 2006: Clash Up and Burn
Gwen Stefani vs. Miles Davis: Summatime Girl

The Earl is somewhat vaporous and cannot be linked to anywhere, but you can get the new mix by clicking on the “Hear This Now” button below.

Kelefa Sanneh tips us to a new soundtrack which is born of corporate wheeler-dealering but ends up as a rather satisfying cutting-edge dance/hip-hop/crooner mashup. Kelefa is never wrong about anything - check his edifying feature about New Orleans hiphop from this Sunday’s NYT if you need more proof of his unassailable investigative prowess. Unfortunately, the NYT does not allow their reviews to be linked to musical examples, leaving us bloggers to fill in the gaps.

My favorite track from Take The Lead is this number which combines 1950’s vocal cool diva June Christy’s version of the Gershwin standard with updates from NY battle rapper Jae Milz, hip-hop gods Eric B & Rakim, and R&B wannabe Mashonda. These sorts of things shouldn’t work, but this one does.

You can find out more about the film Take The Lead here (if you must), and you can buy the soundtrack CD here.

Here’s a very contemporary example of the legacy and influence of My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts — a “song” existing in a pop idiom (hip-hop) that eschews all live performance of musical instruments in favor of a strategy which relies exclusively on re-combining pre-existing recorded excerpts into a new unique musical event. It even uses “found” vocals, which would not seem out of place as another element in America is Waiting, the opening track from Ghosts.

J Dilla (aka Jay Dee) came out of the Detroit underground and went on to become a major producer, working with De La Soul, Busta Rhymes, A Tribe Called Quest, Common, Macy Gray and others. This track comes from Dilla’s latest album Donuts, which was assembled in his hospital bed while fighting lupus, using a laptop and a stack of LPs. The album was released on his 32nd birthday three days before his death in February.

Donuts is an interesting example in another currently raging musical debate: The Death of The Album. Critics have suggested that the digitization of music and ready availability of per-song purchases are killing longer-form musical products that have traditionally been seen as the ultimate artistic expression in popular music, but here is a prime example of current work which suggests that this is not the case. Donuts resists excerpting (and thus blogging) because its strength is as a 43-minute journey across a series of short interludes. Each track flows into the next seamlessly without a break, and the last track flows perfectly into the first when the album is played on repeat. The whole is much larger than the sum of its parts. Get the CD and experience it for yourself.

You can buy Donuts here. The artist has a web page here.

2006 just might be the year that Baltimore Club blows up. About time, I say. This track comes from the excellent mixtape Bmore Gutter Music: 67 minutes of unstoppable energy, high-octane obscenity, infectious stripped-down beats, and relentless DJ skills, emerging spontaneously from the minds and hands of Baltimore’s own Aaron LaCrate and the less-famous half of the Hollertronix team, DJ Low Budget. They get a lot of help from Spank Rock and the foul-mouthed Amanda Blank, who both rant on this track, in addition to a host of snippets from some of Baltimore’s finest local MCs.

This is not the most authentic version of the insanity known as Baltimore Club (as if authenticity matters). For the purest version of the genre check DJ Technics and Rod Lee, for instance. But part of the reason that Bmore Club has flown below the radar for so long is because it is hard to translate from a live club to a fixed medium like a CD, and even harder to make legally releasable versions of the pure stuff, which overlays the crazy beats with appropriated samples of everything from Sponge Bob Squarepants to Sanford and Son. But here is a CD that you can actually buy, even outside of Baltimore, which takes the rawest of the Bmore raw and filters it through a more worldly international DJ scene, serving it up hot and ready for the hipster set. Highly recommended.

You can buy Bmore Gutter Music here or here. Wikipedia has an amusingly pedantic encyclopedia entry about Baltimore Club here. Aaron LaCrate has a Myspace page here, complete with more mp3s. Hook up with DJ Technics here, and buy Rod Lee’s brilliant Vol. 5: The Offical CD here.

The Year of The Dog is almost two weeks old, but the celebrations continue.

I picked up this CD in a shopping mall in Phnom Penh in 2003 - I should say “the” shopping mall, because there is only one mall in Phnom Penh. They had just installed Cambodia’s very first escalator in the mall, and there was a young woman in a flight attendant’s uniform instructing people in how to use the escalator. The teenagers were way into it, but I saw several older people consider escalating and then move on; it was simply too fast, and too technically challenging. On the third floor of the mall there were many small shops apparently leased by independent vendors with more the feel of an open air market, although the space was typical of shopping malls worldwide - marble floors, glass and steel storefronts etc. In one small shop a man had made a fire out of sticks placed directly on the marble floor and was roasting meat, oblivious to the need for ventilation in an enclosed space.

I’m telling you all of this not as an exotic travelogue, or as a patronizing “look how primitive the Cambodians are” sort of thing. I’m telling you this as an example of how ubiquitous hip-hop has become worldwide. Hip-hop is now a universal pop culture. Consider this: in a country which has only one escalator, there are kids with recording studios, wearing baggy pants and bandanas, rapping over sampled beats, burning CDs of their work, and selling them in the mall.

Anyway, two doors down from the meat roasting man was a music shop, not unlike a music shop in any mall worldwide. Chrome racks of CDs, mirrored walls, Madonna blaring, sales clerks who look like moonlighting high school students. I bought a stack of CDs, including Cream Remixes of Khmer Hip Hop, which this track comes from. The CD also features tracks from The Phnom Penh Bad Boyz and DJ Sope.

I’ve reprinted a fascinating article about the Cambodian hip-hop scene from The Phnom Penh Post here. Miraculously, you can actually purchase Cream Remixes of Khmer Hip Hop for $5 here.

Happy Year of The Dog!

Which is more disturbing? The unholy alliance of Starbucks, The Black Eyed Peas, and Sergio Mendes releasing mediocre crap, or the same unholy alliance releasing music which is actually… well… good? Might there come a time when we look forward to a trip to McCoffee to eagerly fork over $17.99 for a CD along with our $6 hazelnut lo-caf Fripperccino? Could this be the brave new world of music in the 21st Century?

Is the new CD Timeless the despicable bastard offspring of synergistic Uber-bland Korporate Kulture, or could it be a true breath of musical fresh air, sneaking into the caffeinated American heartland on a hip-hop Trojan horse cantering to a Samba beat? You can listen and decide for yourself right now at sergiomendestimeless.com. I’m particularly enjoying the track Yes Yes Y’all, which has taken Left-Coast tastemakers KCRW by storm a full two months in advance of its February 14th release.

We can take cold comfort in the fact that this new CD is not as good as Sergio Mendes 1992 outing Brasileiro, in which he first combined hip-hop ideas with Bahian rhythms. This fantastic track What Is This? is taken from that release. You can find Brasileiro here (for about the price of two cappuccinos), and pre-order Timeless here.

You can’t turn on the radio right now without hearing the snowman and the illegal alien from New Jersey trifling on the feather-light but infectious original version of this track. But if you’re going to have it stuck in your head, might as well have *this* version up in there. The hilariously over-the-top gunfire sounds take the central concept to its logical conclusion, and Vybz Kartel spits with the confidence of an M16. There are also fine contributions from Sizzla & Shabba Ranks.

Kartel might just be 2005’s Hardest Working Man In Show Business, and his new CD J.M.T. is about to drop any day. When it does you’ll find it here. More about Kartel at his label Greensleeves here. To hear more from Akon or Young Jeezy, just go outside and walk around.